There's no evidence to support claims the outage is caused by Anonymous hackers.

GoDaddy, one of the Internet's biggest webhosting providers, experienced technical difficulties on Monday that prevented many people from visiting sites that relied on the service for connectivity.

A little after 5 p.m. California time on Monday, company officials took to Twitter to say the outage was mostly resolved.

"Most customer hosted sites back online," the dispatch stated. "We're working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers. No customer data compromised."

Searches using the dig utility also indicated domain name system servers operated by GoDaddy competitor VeriSign were being used to resolve the godaddy.com domain name. Wired reported VeriSign was hosting GoDaddy's DNS servers, too, although Ars couldn't independently verify that. One reason GoDaddy might turn to VeriSign is to avail itself of functional domain-name-resolution services. VeriSign operates a denial-of-service mitigation service called iDefense, so another possibility is that GoDaddy is under attack and is turning to VeriSign for help blocking it.

Monday evening's update from GoDaddy came after it spent much of the day combating an outage that affected virtually every domain it hosted.

"We are aware of an issue affecting several services, including e-mail, our website and some customer websites," company officials wrote in a status update posted early Monday afternoon. "We understand your frustration. We want you to know that our team is investigating the source of the issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible."

"Update: Still working on it, but we're making progress," GoDaddy representatives wrote in a separate Twitter dispatch. "Some service has already been restored. Stick with us."

Anecdotal evidence suggests the outages aren't universal. GoDaddy's homepage, as well as GoDaddy-hosted sites such as tuCloud.com were inaccessible on Monday afternoon for two Ars reporters. One reporter was located in the UK and was using a custom domain name system lookup server, while the other was located on the United States east coast and used DNS servers provided by ISP RCN. Both of those sites worked fine for a separate Ars reporter located in California who was using OpenDNS, a free service that translates human-readable domain names into the IP addresses relied on by computers that route Internet traffic. There were widespread reports on Twitter and elsewhere from other users who also reported trouble reaching GoDaddy-hosted sites.

"We have a lot of customers who want to know why their whole internet world is down and yet their equipment is running just fine," Tony Kapela, vice president of data center and network services at managed hosting provider 5Nines.com, told Ars.

Shortly after this article was published, some people who previously reported site outages said they were no longer experiencing outages. Others reported precisely the opposite.

At publication time, there was no evidence to support claims that the outage was the result of a denial of service attack. The unverified claims came from someone who identified himself as a member of the Anonymous hacking collective. The North American Network Operators Group has yet to provide any evidence supporting or refuting claims a denial-of-service attack was responsible.